


res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself)

by TolkienGirl



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Captain America: The First Avenger, F/M, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, Super Soldier Serum, inspired by e.e. cummings' 'what if a much of a which of a wind', the title is a legal concept
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-06-14 06:58:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15383217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: An early funeral is by far the kindest.





	res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself)

what if a much of a which of a wind

gives the truth to summer's lie;

bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun

and yanks immortal stars awry?

Blow king to beggar and queen to seam

_(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)_

\--when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,

the single secret will still be man

 

An early funeral is by far the kindest. Here lies the deceased ( _that is you_ ) who was too young, and too brave, for the wild world that lost him. He was five-foot-nearly-nothing of asthmatic, aching lungs and one shoulder higher than the other. He lied his way into honor, but the honor, at least was earned.

( _You do not remember the ice. The crash, of course,_ hurt _—but it was only one riveting, rattling blow._ )

( _You were still thinking of Peggy_.)

His body betrayed him, time and again. Too sick for the school trips. Coney Island with Buck was supposed to make up for that, all the museums that dozens of shivering kids tripped through, of a February when he was tucked up with bronchitis for the third time already that year.

His mother died because he lived. That is the simplest explanation.

His father died in the Great War; they said the bullet caught him between the eyes.

An early funeral is by far the kindest; he had to watch his mother, over so much time, go gray.

So. Told backwards then.

Steven Grant Rogers, trading names with a first martyr and a war-torn general, very much and yet very much _not_ like both these things, gives up the world to keep a friend, and gave up a friend long before it comes to that, because he was trying to keep the world in order. There are no longer asthmatic lungs to blame, not much gloried memory to hide behind; he’s always been a burden, just in the way he held his chin up.

(Too many principles.)

Can’t blame those on the serum, or the ice, or any of his great wars.

 

What if a keen of a lean wind flays

screaming hills with sleet and snow:

strangles valleys by ropes of thing

and stifles forests in white ago?

Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind

_(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)_

—whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,

it's they shall cry hello to the spring

 

One shouldn’t live long enough to befriend both father and son.

If he ever really _was_ Tony’s friend, and he knows that’s more his fault than Tony’s.

Tony saw visions, because he had to, and Steve saw the future, because he chose to.

Sokovian winters are trapped in the blood, a time of almost-happiness. (Pocket out that happiness, if you can—it does not last forever.) Tony built a team around people. Steve built a team because someone is going to fall, and someone is going to have to stay behind, and the best he has to offer is that yeah, he’s always willing for that someone to be him.

So. None of this makes sense. None of this goes together, or maybe, all of it does. Maybe he knows how they sound when they are laughing and maybe he lets himself laugh too. Maybe there is a man buried under all that ice after all.

( _You never asked for the ice_.)

Scratch back in time, to the first breath he ever really took, even though the doctor’s finger was slowing like a pulse against his chest. Two taps. _Soldier_ , _man_.

If he is looking at the sky, and not thinking of Peggy or Bucky or Tony or the way the world is flying towards the sun, he can almost pretend he would do it all again.

These are principles. They are eternal, and he is immortal.

( _Those do not mean the same thing_.)

 

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream

bites this universe in two,

peels forever out of his grave

and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?

Blow soon to never and never to twice

 _(blow life to isn't: blow death to was_ )

—all nothing's only our hugest home;

the most who die, the more we live.


End file.
